The Most Powerful Lines From Marcus Aurelius

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. This book right here is a miracle. It should not exist. It was not ever intended for publication. That this book would make its way here to us all these years later on a continent that he could not even have imagined existing is a miracle upon miracles.

I'm talking, of course, about Marcus Aurelius's meditation, The Private Thoughts of the Emperor of Rome. And I love this book. I've read it more than a hundred times. Every time I read it, I get something new out of it. And I wanted to read you some of my favorite passages, passages that have changed my life, and passages that I think will change your life.

It's a scary thing when you realize you can't trust your mind. And yet when you realize you can't trust your mind, it makes you less afraid. In Book 411, he says, not what your enemy sees and hopes that you will, but what's really there. In Alcoholics Anonymous, they have this great acronym for fear. It's false evidence appearing real.

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